The printing industry is in a fundamental state of transformation. In order to remain competitive, print service providers need to embrace a total workflow model that enables them to produce at the highest level of efficiency, while at the same time, diversifying with niche offerings or marketing-related services.

The ability to support print service providers with an expanding range of software applications is challenging for many print production software vendors. The software development processes in place today are often not flexible enough, or it takes vendors too long to come to market with innovative solutions. Additionally, most Print Service Providers have very limited investment power and struggle to make significant investments in workflows, which significantly limits the opportunity for the vendor community.

The potential of the cloud is to break this dynamic. As we have seen in other industries (e.g. force.com from Salesforce is a great example), the move to the cloud has the ability to create “network effects”; new applications built on a common infrastructure that transform and redefine the value delivery model. They provide benefits in terms of deployment, maintenance, and functionality that are virtually impossible to develop with on-premise, licensed software.

The printing industry is clearly evolving in the direction of cloud-based workflows. In the years to come, we expect digital equipment vendors to create production print app networks that connect vendors, partners, customers and their customers in ways that we have not seen before. By providing a stack of technology with open interfaces, 3rd party software developers (or vendors themselves or their customers) can rapidly develop new technology without having to worry about installation, uptime, failover or other infrastructural considerations.

InfoTrends’ “Cloud-based Workflows & Infrastructures for Graphic Communications” study aims to provide critical insights that software technology vendors or leading print service providers need to create cutting-edge cloud workflow strategies, e.g. for the development, implementation and deployment of cloud networks. The research provides recommendations across a range of environments and geographies, and helps determine in which situations cloud deployment is more beneficial than using existing on-premise, licensed solutions.